Gen Z Is Openly Sharing Purchase Data – and That's a Social Network

01 /The Concept

Claim first [appeared on Startuping's radar](/review/zarabatyvaj-prjamo-so-starta) late last year, when it raised $4 million in a round led by Sequoia Capital. At that point, the app was running in pilot mode at just a handful of colleges and universities in the Boston area.

Fast-forward to today: Claim is live at 70 universities across the US and is generating close to 5x return on ad spend for its merchant partners. That kind of traction doesn't stay quiet, and the company has now raised $12 million in new funding – bringing total investment to $18 million.

Claim's tagline is "share your rewards with friends." That sharing happens as the natural result of the mechanics the app is built around.

The app is a feed of purchases made through Claim. Each user's purchases are public and visible to anyone who visits their profile or follows their feed.

Every purchase earns cashback, plus a bonus – typically a discount on the next visit or a chance to try something free, like a new dish or a cocktail.

Users can keep their bonus or trade it with another user's bonus from a different merchant.

Because all bonuses across all users show up in the feed, there's always a chance to spot an appealing offer from somewhere you've never been – and claim it by swapping your own reward from a place you already know. It's a natural discovery mechanism that converts social visibility into foot traffic.

The most popular category is restaurants and cafes, but the app includes both offline and online retailers. For purchases to appear in the feed, merchants must join the Claim network by issuing cashback and bonuses through the platform.

Claim earns a small percentage on every cashback transaction.

Merchants can also participate in "drops" – bonus giveaways that happen every Thursday. A user who receives a free drop bonus can use it themselves or trade it with another user's merchant bonus, which is again visible to everyone in the feed. Merchants pay for this as an advertising placement.

02 /Why It Matters

Claim's target audience is young people – which is why the app spread initially through colleges and universities.

That wasn't an arbitrary choice. The startup's argument is that Gen Z operates by different defaults than older generations – and one of the most significant is a genuine comfort with transparency.

Users have to agree that their purchase activity becomes visible to everyone else. Without that agreement, the mechanics don't work at all.

For a generation raised in a digital environment, this isn't a big ask. They grew up understanding that any action leaves a digital trail. Resisting that is mostly futile – the trace exists whether you acknowledge it or not. So you might as well lean into it and get something out of the arrangement.

Older generations are still anxious about being tracked. Gen Z has largely made peace with it – and, as an EY study argues, has replaced privacy as a primary value with authenticity. Transparency, in this view, is what makes authenticity possible.

The data backs this up: 8 in 10 Gen Z respondents say they're comfortable sharing their salary with others, and 90% are willing to tell a colleague or manager what they honestly think of their work quality.

That shift has changed how you motivate people from this generation – both as employees and as consumers. As one Forbes headline put it: "Want to motivate Gen Z? Try transparency."

Claim isn't the only startup leveraging this openness.

Haz ([related review](/review/drugaja-prostaja-mehanika-vmesto-marketplejsa)) built an app where users' clothing purchases are visible to others – enabling resale with built-in authenticity, or prompting someone to ask if they can buy a piece directly from your wardrobe. It raised €1.2 million in its first round this May.

Howbout ([related review](/review/a-teper-vse-poshli-obratno)) raised $13 million for a calendar-sharing app that lets users make their plans visible to friends – so people can intersect organically, without scheduling in advance.

Frich ([related review](/review/luchshe-segmentirovat-auditoriju-po-psihologicheskim-osobennostjam)) built an app that surfaces financial data shared anonymously by peers – what people your age, in your field, in your city earn; what they pay in rent; what they spend on. Users contribute their own data and see aggregated results from others. The app currently shows anonymized averages, though given the generation's comfort level, more individual transparency could come. It raised $3.5 million.

03 /Opportunities

A recurring theme worth underscoring: successful startups tend to identify and build on changes that are happening right now – in markets, technology, or human behavior. Everything that could have been built on old patterns has already been built. If something obvious-looking doesn't exist yet, someone has probably tried it and it didn't work.

The transparency norm emerging in younger generations is one of those live behavioral shifts. It's a valid structural basis for new mechanics.

The direction: build platforms for new generations that use transparency as a core mechanic. Purchase history, earnings, schedules, investments, relationships – or anything else people in older demographics were reluctant to share.

Some questions to pressure-test any specific idea: What can be made transparent that people previously kept private? What real-world data can ground it? Who else benefits – and how? What monetization model captures that value?

One purely illustrative example, riffing on the student context: many students work side jobs. What if side-job activity were made visible? Users discover new income opportunities. Employers find candidates more easily. And side-hustlers themselves could earn per-hour bonuses for logging their work – following the model pioneered by Salt Labs ([related review](/review/dlja-posetitelej-est-a-dlja-sotrudnikov-net)), which raised $18 million and was later acquired by the banking service Chime.

What transparency mechanic would you build – and for whom?